Harriet Tubman in Statuary Hall Campaign

Equal Visibility Everywhere (EVE) and Maryland’s NOW launched a campaign today to get a Harriet Tubman statue in the National Statuary Hall, where she would be the first African American and first enslaved person to be so honored. Tubman, a Maryland-born abolitionist and suffragist known for conducting the Underground Railroad to rescue slaves from servitude, would only be the 10th woman in the hall among 100 statues.

States are each allowed two statues in the hall and may switch theirs every 10 years. EVE already has a campaign underway in Ohio to replace one of its statues with a woman, and is working on campaigns for women statues in Kansas, New York, California, Florida and Oklahoma.

“What a lot of [Statuary Hall] visitors probably don’t realize is that the Capitol was built partly with slave labor,” says Suzanne Scoggins, communications director for EVE. “The huge marble columns in Statuary Hall were quarried, cut, and polished by slaves.”

Public domain photo of Harriet Tubman by H. Seymour Squyer from National Portrait Gallery.

Comments

Though I’m not American, I see Harriet Tubman as an international icon who has inspired millions to think, to act, and not to accept their fate when it is unjust. It would be fitting for her to be honoured by her country of origin as the heroine she is to the world. Perhaps there ought to be a global hall of fame somewhere under U.N. auspices or something of the kind.

Why is it that it is so hard to get a woman hero acknowledged. We now even have a holiday for an African-American man, but as yet no women. If there is one woman who I think is above the rest, it is Harriet Tubman and I would support a statue on the Mall in Washington, not just in the National Statuary Hall and a holiday named for her.